


How the Ghosts Stole Christmas

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Nip/Tuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-22
Updated: 2005-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:11:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by Malograntum Vitiorum</p><p>And the strangest things seem suddenly routine.<br/>(A brief note:  It hardly needs saying, but this is an AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Ghosts Stole Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> Written for zahra

 

 

1\. And if you ever saw it

"Beg pardon?"

The man sitting across from them leaned a little forward, puzzled by Sean's question. Sean had felt curious himself when the man walked in--there weren't any obvious problem areas on his face, which was on the square-jawed and conventionally attractive side, and he seemed to be in excellent health and comfortable in his own skin. It was probably going to be a penis thing, though it was dangerous to make assumptions with the people who came in this time of year. Maybe he wanted reverse lipo to be a better department store Santa.

"What you don't like about yourself," Sean repeated. "Let's talk about what we can do to help you feel better about your appearance."

"I'm sorry," the man answered. "I must have been unclear when I spoke to the young lady on the phone--I'm not here for a medical consultation. I'm looking for this man."

He produced a photograph of a guy who looked like a more plausible customer--beady eyes, receded hairline and what Sean would describe very generously as a _prominent_ nose. "I believe he may have found himself in circumstances that called for a change in appearance, and the last I knew he was living in this area."

There was obviously a million years of story going into that summary, and the guy was taking some pains to be cool and professional and give none of it away. Sean tried to search the face in the photo for clues. His mind wandered to other noses he had known recently, and he realized he had tuned out for a moment.

"It's a confidentiality issue," Christian was saying. "If he was our patient, we couldn't give out information about him, except to law enforcement under certain PATRIOT Act provisions."

"Of course. Forgive me--I would expect nothing less of any reputable establishment." He got up to leave, seeming about to say something else and then to think better of it. "I wonder if you would do me one small favor?"

"Sure." Sean felt for the guy, whatever the story was. Sean could only see that nose in that photo in terms of how it could be improved, but it was obvious that it was a nose that at least one person cared about.

"Can you provide me with the names of some of the less reputable establishments in the immediate area?"

"Why don't you sit back down?" A grin played behind Christian's eyes. "It's a long list."

*

2\. If the fates allow

The spa seemed clean and respectable enough, though the surgeons had put it at the top of their list with an underline and a little star and a wry look exchanged between them. It was run by a thin blonde woman who came across, were he to make a snap judgment based on their very brief acquaintance, as highly competent and perhaps just a touch more tightly wound than necessary.

She had listened to his preamble with oddly divided interest--as though deeply attentive to his situation, yet trying to do a detailed analysis of something unrelated in her head at the same time.

"So you stayed on as liason to the Canadian Consulate."

He nodded. "Precisely."

"But you're not attached to the Chicago P.D. anymore."

"No, ma'am."

"So--I'm sorry, I don't think I understand. Is this--investigation--is it domestic or. . . international?" She kept glancing to his right and pausing distractedly at seemingly random places in her conversation. Occasionally her eyes darted to a nearby display of some beauty product and then jerked guiltily back.

"You could call it domestic." Fraser took a look at the product display himself, and noticed the woman twitch.

"Benton." His father appeared at his elbow. "I need to talk to you about this place."

"But you're here on. . ." She looked at him skeptically. "Mountie business?"

"Not exactly, ma'am."

"If I could interrupt for a second," his father said.

"You see, it's not so much an official investigation as a sort of exploratory, sub rosa--"

"You're going to want to know about this, Benton."

"Will you SHUT UP!" Ms. McNamara's outburst was sudden, almost ear-shatteringly loud and apparently directed at his father. The instant she'd said it, she covered her mouth in shock and turned away from him, her shoulders shaking.

"Ms. McNamara," he said cautiously. He was suddenly aware of what her behavior had really meant--he just wasn't used to seeing someone besides himself following two parallel conversations on separate planes of existence. "Do you see someone in this room other than the two of us?"

She leaned against the doorway, her back to him, all sharp angles. "No."

His father tried to get in on the conversation again. "Son, I'm trying to--"

"Are you quite sure? I think I ought to tell you--" he took a cautious step toward her-- "that I do."

She spun around, her eyes impossibly wide. "You--you do?"

"Yes, I have for some time now."

"Oh my god." She pressed her hands to her face. "Oh god. I'm not crazy."

"That's debatable," Fraser's father said.

"There! You see--" she addressed the empty air a few feet to the left of his father. "Mom, he can see you too!"

"I'm sorry, Ms. McNamara. Did you say 'Mom'?"

". . . Yes?"

"She's talking to the unhinged woman that you _can't_ see, Benton."

Fraser furrowed his brow. "I don't think that's any way to talk about someone's mother, especially if she is, as I assume she must be, deceased."

"Who are you talking to?" She looked in his father's general direction but not at him directly, anxious and confused again.

"You wouldn't say that if you could hear what she's been saying about you," Fraser's father told him.

*

3\. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

It had taken Erica a couple of weeks to get over the initial shock of being dead. She couldn't sit around at Julia's place forever, so she would walk down the street, try to go into stores or start toward a Starbucks. But no one ever saw her, and it was some time before she could convince herself that an eternity of not being seen could be anything other than Hell.

All this was before she started hanging around Julia at work, which turned out to be a blast. There was always some fascinatingly terrible drama happening among the employees, there were naked strangers around all the time, and occasionally she got to watch Joan Rivers drop by and cover her face with Julia's Magical Semen Cream, or whatever they called that particular marketing coup. And, of course, she could talk to Julia while she was trying to do her job and Julia couldn't answer her.

There seemed to be a limit to how far she could comfortably travel from Julia, but now and then she would go as far as the boys' homes or office and bring back stories to share with her, usually while she was talking to clients.

"With a _bag_ over her _head_ ," she'd confide in a stage whisper, sitting on the end of the bed while Julia was checking in on how some dumpy housewife was enjoying her new tits. "And she comes back in the next morning and says, I looked on the _internet_ \--"

She figured they might as well have some fun, since it looked as though they might be spending a long time together, but even when they were alone, Julia never wanted to talk.

*

4\. I'll be home for Christmas

It was another week before Julia heard from the Mountie again, and if he hadn't come back she might have started to think that _he_ had been a hallucination.

"My father and I have had a great many rewarding experiences together since his death," he'd said after the ghosts left the room to talk about whatever dead people talked about. He spoke of the subject as someone who'd come to take his haunting in stride, or perhaps someone who had fit these supernatural visitations into a life that was already surreal beyond most people's imagining.

As she thought about it, that second explanation made a lot of sense to her.

"I thought--well, I thought I was carrying her around because I was insane."

"I can imagine how one might think so."

"And then maybe that I had brought this terrible supernatural curse on myself, seeing her everywhere. But she doesn't _complain_ about being dead. She just sits on my desk and talks to me."

"What do you talk about?"

"She--she tells me gossip, she gives me advice, sometimes she says things about what it would have been like if she'd lived, usually to the tune of how no one would ever have had sex with her again anyway." Julia needed a second, there, to get through the tightness in her throat. "Mostly I pretend she's not there and hope she goes away."

"Does that work?"

Since she couldn't actually help the living-dead Mountie team on their quest to find the funny-looking guy in the picture, they soon parted ways, with well wishes between the living and some kind of very weird argument between the dead. That evening her mother sat beside her in the car as she drove home and they exchanged, in fits and starts, a few words on how attractive the live Mountie had been and a series of idle speculations on his upbringing and sexual orientation.

She walked into the spa the following Monday to find it full of arguing men. Sean and Christian stood to the side looking sleep-deprived and confused while Fraser and the big-nosed guy from the picture talked over each other in her foyer. She assumed from Fraser's distracted style that there was at least one more dead person in the room besides her mother, who was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, watching with a cool, bemused smile.

"You came all the way from Bumblefuck, Canada because your emails were bouncing? It's not that I'm not happy to see you. . ."

"Your dropping out of sight suddenly is not entirely without precedent, Ray. And when I arrived to find that the bowling alley had been converted into a fitness club, it did arouse my suspicions further."

"Where's--" The guy who was apparently named Ray paused to choose his words. "You-know-who?"

"Don't tell me Voldemort is involved in this, too." Everyone turned to look at Julia. "I _read_ them to my _daughter_ ," she added, a little defensively.

"She does all the voices," her mother added.

"He stayed at home with the dogs," Fraser said in answer to the original question. "I gather he was right in telling me that there was nothing to worry about?"

"Of course there's something going on, which I was gonna tell you about when it was over, but as usual you have to go and--"

"Can I ask," Julia cut through the conversation again, "what you're all doing in my spa?"

"Uh." Sean looked vaguely embarrassed. "It's a long story."

"I was asking the same thing," her mother said. "I learned a lot about someone named Buck Frobisher, but I never got an answer to my question."

"Okay." Julia parked her hands on her hips. "I'm sure you've all been having a very interesting day, and I'd love to hear about how the Inuit defeated Voldemort, but I have Joan Rivers coming in this morning, so." She made a motherly sort of shooing motion at them all. "If you don't mind."

"Of course." Fraser nodded to her apologetically. "Thank you for all your help, ma'am."

"Tell Joan we said hi," Sean added as they all shuffled to the door.

"Nice to meet you," Ray said to Julia. "Fraser, put that down."

Fraser was holding a jar of face cream, and she suddenly remembered how he had caught her looking at it before, when she'd been feeling paranoid about all the reasons that it was a bad idea to have a law enforcement officer loose in the spa.

"Excuse me, that's not a sample," she said, keeping her voice as even as possible as he unscrewed the lid and took a sniff. "Excuse me--" He dipped his pinky into the jar and, as Julia's chest froze in horror, touched his tongue to his finger. Too late, she reached out to stop him. "Please don't--"

"Don't worry about him," Ray said with a familial kind of annoyance. "He does this all the time."

The Mountie made the most extraordinary face and very carefully replaced the lid on the jar.

"It's for _external_ use," she said lamely, visions filling her head of the business crashing down around her, headlines, Fox News, _Joan Rivers_. . .

He met her eyes and said with absolute calm, "I beg to differ, ma'am."

And Julia heard her mother laugh and laugh and laugh, and Julia ignored the stares of all the men and laughed with her.

-end-

 


End file.
